To Serve
by SeraphChronoMage
Summary: Then will you serve me for the power I offer?


Disclaimer: I don't own this. Like, not at all.

This place was dark. Not the nice friendly darkness of the Radiant Garden nights, speckled with stars on the navy-purple (almost black) sky. Not even the dark of a cloudy midnight on the new moon or the shadows you got when you closed your eyes and covered them as tightly as you could with your hands. It was the blackness _behind _all of those, that thing you almost saw when someone hit you so hard you'd wake up several hours later, dizzy with a concussion. It was the dark of the absolute and total absence of light.

He could almost see himself, but the fact that there wasn't any light kept defeating his imagination. How do you look in the total absence of something that you've known and perceived yourself in and by since the minute you were born? Nevertheless, his brain automatically projected what he _knew_ had to be there. If you can feel it but not see it, does that mean it exists?

He sat up. He had been on the ground, (it was the ground, right? If it felt like the ground, did that mean it actually was?) lying as if someone had thrown him, uncaring of where or on what he landed. Of course, if someone actually had thrown him, they probably wouldn't have cared in the first place. The ground (or was it a floor?) was smooth and _almost_ yielded under his hands and body.

There was no _sound_ here, just the noise of his own heartbeat and breathing. It made him want to stop them both, if only because someone could find him easily by the sound. And whatever was here was most likely unfriendly, if not downright hostile. It was odd, that the only time he had ever really noticed how loud he was, there was no sound to compare it to.

He lifted a hand in front of his face. He knew it was there, could almost see it because his brain automatically projected an almost-image where it calculated his hand was. He'd heard about people getting lost in caves without lights and having their brains trick them into thinking that they could see a tunnel where there was only solid rock. He wondered briefly how long it would take his brain to start convincing his eyes that _something_ was there.

Maybe he was dead. An unpleasant thought, but one worth considering. Being stuck in darkness for the rest of eternity wasn't what most people thought of when they thought of hell, but it was probably pretty effective nonetheless. Eventually you were bound to go insane.

It was only a little bit later that he realized that he had begun to forget what light was like. It was frightening to think that he _could_ forget what light was like. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

Light was just a distant memory now. He knew, intellectually, what it was. When he thought about it though, it slipped through his fingers.

Forgetting everything was not a pleasant experience. He could already tell that he was getting slightly...askew. It would probably get worse as time went on.

Blankness. He'd been reviewing his memories until he realized that there were gaps where the memory just seemed to give out, like a...

Frustrating, the way he knew that there should be something there, but he didn't know _what_.

The darkness _throbbed_ with consciousness. It hadn't been until he thought of extending outwards that he had noticed it. There was something here besides him.

Tendrils of thought coalesced. It wasn't as if there was suddenly light, as much as he could now see.

Darkness was female and clothed in what looked like feathers. Her eyes glittered red, her lips curved up slightly, and her black hair curled out. She was, for lack of a better word, beautiful, but not in a way that could ever be considered human.

"_Will you offer yourself to me and become one with the darkness?_" she asked, her voice as much inside his head as audible.

He thought, then replied, "No."

"_No?_" Almost surprised. Not expected, certainly.

"I belong to no one." Firm. Not arguing, he wasn't trying to sway her, just expressing his feeling.

An almost smile. "_Then will you serve me, for the power I offer?_"

Power. What he had always desired for. "I will serve."

She reached out and took a firm hold of him, then tugged him up to meet her. The kiss was bloody, her teeth puncturing his lip and the taste suffusing his mouth along with that of darkness, thick and syrupy. A long moment, and she released him, licking the blood off her lips.

"_You'll do_." Cold lazily wound its way through his veins, leaving him hissing at the almost-pain. He could see the silver curtain of his hair, the black leather of his clothes, pale skin.

"_Yes, you'll do quite nicely_."

A.N.: Wow, my first real fanfiction. Hopefully it's decent.

I'm one of those people who think that the darkness probably has at least some kind of consciousness. Why shouldn't it? I wrote it female out of my personal feelings of how darkness incarnate would look. Not scary or even formidable, but exotic.

Please read and review. God, I am so hungry.


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